


Bourbon

by NectarineMigraine



Category: Rhett & Link
Genre: Angst, I think?, Internalized Homophobia, Just to be safe, M/M, Past Infidelity, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-11
Updated: 2019-11-11
Packaged: 2021-01-27 09:49:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21390181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NectarineMigraine/pseuds/NectarineMigraine
Summary: A vignette.  "Rhett remembers the soft, wet heat of his best friend’s mouth, the bristling livewire electric-shock of it."
Relationships: Rhett McLaughlin/Link Neal
Comments: 8
Kudos: 22





	Bourbon

It’s only happened once. 

It was a long time ago, ten plus years at least. He hasn’t bothered to count exactly. When was it, 2007? 2008, maybe. They’d been working in the basement, some unremarkable Thursday evening in Lillington, increasingly excited about something–-he can’t even remember what because he tries hard not to think about it. He does remember they’d been drinking. Bourbon, the kind that burns all the way down and sits in your stomach the way leftover campfire sparks smolder and smoke after the flames die out. They’d been hovering over a crude concept drawn up on a sheet of printer paper, propped on their elbows, craned in, heels of their palms dotted with smudges of blue pen. Part of his excitement had been merely at the prospect that it was going to work–-_this_ was going to work, the way Rhett knew it would on those days working at his engineering desk doing schematics and feeling his spirit starving more and more every day. But it would only work with Link. He’d only want it to work with Link. 

Leaned in so close over the table, the chemical smell of ink and ozone from the early evening rainstorm, aftershave and sweat and bourbon on Link’s breath, Rhett remembers. Mid-laugh, they’d connected, just for a breath, a heartbeat—but Rhett remembers the soft, wet heat of his best friend’s mouth, the bristling livewire electric-shock of it, the push of whiskey-laced lips and the brush of his tongue before Link was wrenching away with a gasp, hands clutching to his face. And then the apologies came. Oh, the apologies. Like it was all _his_ fault. All those sorries tumbling out of the same mouth he just kissed with a kind of terror gripping his expression in way Rhett had never seen. 

What struck him, what makes the memory so vivid, somehow almost more than the kiss, was that Rhett wasn’t sorry. He knew he was supposed to be: they had wives and children and they’d had their chance, whatever kind of chance it really was, and never taken it. But Rhett wasn’t sorry. He still isn’t. 

And Link seemed sorry enough for the both of them.

Being honest, Rhett’s thought of it every day of his life since. The way Link always leans away first when they’re too close implies a similar revisiting of that moment on his end, though they’ve never spoken of it. Sometimes the memory careens into him from nowhere, a thousand pounds barreling into his guts. And when he looks hard for it, he can see it: the same restrained flicker of fear in Link’s features–-vague but everywhere, like the smell of smoke. 

He hadn’t understood it at the time properly. They’d been young and stupid, and he thought that Link was afraid of hell. All these years later, he understands what that actually means. 

What Link is terrified of is the hell that is losing Rhett. It’s that same mountain they’ve been scaling their whole lives, skirting the edge. One slip–one real taste–and they’d tumble down the mountain together. And it would be exciting, exhilarating, almost a relief, to finally fall. But at the bottom, they’d be broken. And they _can’t_ be.

They can’t be. He _is_ sorry for that. 

But if Rhett ever finds himself alone at a bar, he orders bourbon. Two fingers of it, on the rocks, leaning over the bar so nobody can see the misery that pinches his forehead when he revisits a long past rainy evening, and tastes the ghost of Link’s mouth.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr at nectarine-migraine.tumblr.com


End file.
